Nick Doiron's favorites

Favorite sessions for this user

The new space industry is expanding rapidly, with huge opportunities for open-source contributions. This talk focuses on the case study of Asterank, software that makes space data easier to access and explore. Its analysis and visualization tools have been used in government, private industry, and schools. The project has made public space data more open and usable for millions of people.

By 2020 each person will create 1.7 MB of new data per second flooding us in 44 trillion GB of data! What’s this mean? From Uber’s “ride of shame” scandal to the role of Facebook’s news recommender in the presidential election we as developers must ask how we use data and what the implications are for open source software.

Making open source software translatable is easy, right? You just take out all the strings, put them in a translation file in your git repository, and start accepting pull requests. Simple! Well, not so fast. There’s a lot more to this than meets the eye, and if you take a quick and dirty approach you’ll end up with upset translators, complaints from users, and mysteries like “what is ١٢٬٣٤٥٬٦٧٨ and why does my code want to parse that as a number?”. Thankfully, there are open source resources and libraries that can take care of these things for you.

Let's be real: tech companies value engineering skills over most other skills, and it shows in both salaries and decisionmaking. This talk is about why this happens, why it's problematic, and how we can refocus importance on all the skills that make companies successful.

Paying people for their work is radical, whether we're talking about open source contributions, second-shift diversity work, or even care at home. But giving people the resources necessary to make these community contributions is the only way to make our communities more sustainable.

Conventional wisdom says that using the cloud means giving up privacy and control. But maybe crypto is actually literally magic and we can have our cake and eat it too? We're mostly not there yet, but let's talk about some of the ways that we're getting close.

The developer community has many ways of determining who belongs and who doesn’t. Some of these are helpful, but others intimidate beginners who could go on to be good developers. This talk will provide a framework for differentiation between the good and the bad.

Open source allows anyone to use their skills to change the world--for better or for worse. In an era where the phrase "Fake News!" echoes from the highest office of the land, we have to cast a critical eye on the works that we promote and participate in. Open Data is no exception, and the use of Open Data to generate Fake Analyses is a real issue that can undermine social progress.

Open source works best when the stakes are high, volunteers are pouring in and tons of stakeholders need to coordinate their resources, so it shouldn't be a surprise that the open source movement is transforming how individuals and institutions respond to disasters.

After making the smallest possible transistors, scientists are developing new computation methods based on quantum mechanics. This talk is an intro to: what makes quantum computing special, how to build assembly-like instructions for quantum computers in Python and JavaScript, and how we could start encrypting data to avoid quantum codebreaking.

Duplication of effort, flawed funding models, and overall lack of project maturity has led to the failure of most open source projects in the international development space. In this talk, we'll discuss the plans of the Digital Impact Alliance at the United Nations Foundation to help increase those projects' maturity, quality, and reach -- with a goal of advancing an inclusive digital society using open source for the poorest places on the planet.

People new to programming often have to work through barriers of language and learning in order to become proficient and being contributing. Does one of those barriers need to be one's math skills? Most schools and textbooks seem to think so. Let's discuss how we're introducing new developers to programming and whether we can make it more inclusive by removing the mathematics and replacing it with logic.

They have started up democratic copies of major platforms. They are building ways to better collaborate using the internet. They’re even talking about citizens buying out and protecting important internet communities like Twitter. Who are these people? They are Platform Cooperativists.

Many talks aimed at beginners to open source contribution assume that concepts like peer review and justification of intent are brand new. If you have ever experienced the thrills–and/or horrors–of a writing workshop, many ideas central to a successful pull request aren't that new at all. Let's talk about what experienced workshoppers and the field of writing critique can bring to your OS project.

Based on The Responsible Communication Style Guide, this workshop is an introduction to the concepts in the style guide. It also covers how a style guide can be an effective part of the workflow when creating and promoting technology projects (including open source).

Favorite proposals for this user

There is always something new to learn in technology. We are always experts in one and beginners in another field. In order to learn successfully it’s important to have a mentor but it’s equally important to learn how to be a good mentor.